1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to data decompression and, more specifically, to decompression of high dynamic range pixel data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional compression techniques and formats, such as the DXTC compressed texture format used by DirectX 8, may be used to compress unsigned data including 3 channels represented by a 16 bit value, such as 565 format RGB data. These compression and decompression techniques and formats do not directly support high dynamic range data that is typically 48 or more bits per pixel (bpp). High dynamic range data is increasingly used as texture maps used to produce high quality images with luminance values that span many orders of magnitude.
Accordingly, there is a need for data compression of high dynamic range values in order to store the values in a compact format that reduces the memory bandwidth needed to read the high dynamic range data. Furthermore, it is desirable to be able to decompress the compressed high dynamic range values in hardware in order to process the high dynamic range values as texture data.